“But,” I said, scrambling to keep up, “can’t we justará Dr. Lawrence about the bullets what killed the boys?”
“We did,” Mr. Moore answered, “on our way out here. But Lawrence has been coroner since ’84-seen a lot of dead bodies in those years. And like Marcus says, his attention in this case was pretty well focused on the little girl. He really can’t say whether there were exit wounds in the boys’ backs.”
“Which leaves us with two options,” Marcus continued, “one just tedious, the other next to impossible. We can either tear the appropriate parts of the wagon into tiny pieces to see if a bullet lodged in the wood somewhere, or…”
“Or?”
Marcus sighed. “Or we try to get a court order allowing us to exhume Thomas and Matthew.”
“The problem there being,” Mr. Moore added, “that any judge is going to want to consult with the mother before ordering an exhumation.” He looked at me and smiled. “Care to post some odds on what Libby Hatch’s reaction to that kind of request would be, Stevie?”
I just shook my head. “Wouldn’t be worth the trouble of figuring them.”
Leaning against one big tree in the front yard was a four-by-three-foot slab of ash wood along with an old, moth-eaten driver’s seat. The bunch of us collected around the things and stared at them.
“But I still don’t understand,” Mr. Moore said. “If Libby was the one who shot the kids, wouldn’t she have made some effort to get rid of the wagon, and any stray bullets along with it?”
“Ballistics is an infant science, John, even among experts,” Marcus answered. “Also, Dr. Lawrence admits that he never examined the boys for exit wounds, since they were already dead-so he never would’ve mentioned such wounds while he was in the house, which meant that she wouldn’t have thought of them, either. Lawrence would, of course, have made a fuss over the wound in the back of Clara’s neck, which must have been pretty awful, given the range.”
“She keeps her hair in a fat braid at the back,” I said, feeling a sudden sadness that I hadn’t when I’d noticed the girl’s hair at the Westons’ farm. “Probably to cover the scar.”
Marcus cocked his head in a way what said this fact fit in with his theory. “But it’s doubtful,” he went on, “that Libby was educated enough about firearms to go speculating about exit trajectories.”
Just then we heard the sound of a rig coming our way, and we all turned to look down the overgrown drive. Heading up it was Miss Howard, sitting on top of a hired buckboard and steering a feisty-looking Morgan stallion. She wrangled the compact, muscular animal to a stop near us, then brushed a few stray wisps of hair out of her face and jumped to the ground.
“Found her!” she called, smiling wide and marching over to us. “Mrs. Louisa Wright, of Beach Street-she lives in a house behind Schafer’s commercial greenhouses. She worked for the Hatches for seven years-and there is, apparently, nothing that she won’t talk about!” She pointed down the hill. “What about the gun? Any luck?”
“Hopefully,” Lucius answered, holding up his moldy old package.
“Yes,” Miss Howard said when she saw it. “Mrs. Wright told me that she wrapped it in a brown paper bag before dumping it. Well, then, we’d better get back, there’s a lot to do!”
As we all gathered around to pile the pieces of the Hatches’ wagon onto our buckboard, Marcus asked Miss Howard what else she’d been able to find out during her visit with Daniel Hatch’s former housekeeper.
“I’ll tell you on the way,” Miss Howard answered, climbing back up to do the driving. “She was, as I say, very talkative. But one thing stands out: she suspects that only one of Daniel Hatch’s children was shot that night.”
“What do you mean, Sara?” Mr. Moore said, as the rest of us got aboard.
But Miss Howard looked to me. “You saw Clara, did you, Stevie?” I nodded. “Fine, light brown hair, eyes a similar shade? Pale-skinned?” I nodded again. “Well, that’s not what the two boys looked like, apparently.”
I right away thought back to Mr. Picton’s request during our approach to the Weston farm that Dr. Kreizler make a note of Clara Hatch’s coloring. “So that’s what he meant,” I said.
“What who meant?” Mr. Moore said.
But before I could answer, Miss Howard had cracked the reins against the Morgan’s haunches and we were under way.
I wasn’t sorry to say good-bye to the old Hatch place, and was glad to see Miss Howard continue to make liberal use of the reins to get us away quickly. Mr. Moore and I sat up on the seat with her, while the detective sergeants rode in the bed with the ash plank, the driver’s seat, and the gun, the last of which items they didn’t plan on unwrapping until we got back to Mr. Picton’s house. For the moment they were full of questions about Mrs. Louisa Wright, questions what Miss Howard tried to answer as fast and thoroughly as she could; and each little bit of information she revealed made it plain that the old housekeeper was going to be a very important player in our case against Libby Hatch.
She hadn’t had much use for Libby during her years with her, Mrs. Wright hadn’t; but fortunately she’d felt the same about Daniel Hatch, which meant that her observations about what went on in the house wouldn’t look to a jury like she was nursing a grudge against the handsome younger woman who’d been her boss. When Marcus asked why, if Mrs. Wright disliked the Hatches so much, she’d stayed on with them for so long, Miss Howard explained that the tough, take-no-nonsense widow’d been the only woman in town who’d been willing to serve the couple; because of that, the family’d grown more and more dependent on her over the years. As they did, Mrs. Wright eventually reached a point where she could pretty well name her fee from old Daniel: over time she’d squeezed enough money out of her tightfisted boss to be able to buy a decent house of her own in town, something that no other job in Ballston Spa what was available to a woman would’ve put her in a position to do. Mrs. Wright hadn’t shed much of a tear when Hatch died, being as he’d left her nothing in his will; and when Libby asked her to stay on at the house the housekeeper’d insisted on her regular salary, which Libby’d agreed to pay, rather than go to the trouble of trying to find and break in somebody new. In other words, emotional considerations hadn’t warped Mrs. Wright’s opinions any; so what she’d seen and was now reporting to us could be pretty well relied on.
Which wasn’t to say that she’d felt nothing for the Hatch kids, who, Mrs. Wright’d told Miss Howard, were caught in a strange and mixed-up situation that kept them in a constant state of skittishness. They’d all spent their early months, as Miss Howard had suspected, with a wet nurse, a setup what’d stopped them from becoming living demonstrations of Libby Hatch’s maternal shortcomings-and was, because of that, the only reason why they’d survived their infancies at all. But life after those early months had still been pretty rocky for them. Clara’d had things the best, being as Daniel Hatch was as sure as he could be that she was his child. But the arrival of first Matthew and then Thomas had caused trouble, being as by then Hatch had begun to suspect his wife of being unfaithful. The fact that the two boys had thick, curly black hair, deep brown eyes, and olive skin (unlike either of their parents or their sister) was taken by Hatch as proof that they’d been fathered by another man; and even though he was never able to say who that man was, he grew more and more hostile to Libby as time went by, and lost interest in Thomas and Matthew altogether.
Strangely enough, Mrs. Wright said, all this hadn’t been just an old man’s ravings: Libby had been cheating on her husband, though with a man that her husband never would have suspected of the crime. It seemed that the minister who’d married the Hatches, one Reverend Clayton Parker, had the same coloring as young Matthew and Thomas, and paid regular visits to the Hatch homestead, where old Daniel entertained him to the best of his curmudgeonly ability. Apparently Mrs. Wright had more than once seen Parker and Libby locked in steamy embrace in the woods beyond the Hatch house, and Libby’s sudden relapse into moody agitation in the summer of 1893 had occurred, coincidentally, right after Parker’d told his superiors that his spiritual talents were being wasted in Ballston Spa, and he’d been dispatched to do good works in that modern-day Babylon, New York City.